The Louvre. Art Guide: 120 essential masterpieces

Por Carlos Javier Taranilla

Discover the immense art collection of the Louvre Museum, from Oriental, Egyptian, Greco-Roman and medieval antiquities to the great works of the Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Painting, sculpture and decorative arts from all periods and civilizations. Works by great French masters such as Poussin and David, Flemish painters such as Rubens and Van Dyck, Dutch artists such as Rembrandt, Italian masters such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and Tintoretto, and Spanish artists such as El Greco, Zurbarán, Velázquez and Goya. An essential book to delve into the structure of the Louvre palace and its dependencies, learning in detail about 120 essential masterpieces among the more than 400,000 pieces contained in the most important museum in the world.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: ArgoNowta
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 1 jul 2023
• ISBN: 9788418943478

Vista previa del libro

Introduction

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The Louvre complex

The Louvre complex, counts with a surface area of more than 210,000 square metres, of which some 65,000 square metres are devoted to galleries. It has an almost rectangular plant, consisting of two main quadrilaterals which include two large courtyards: the Cour Carrée (‘Square Courtyard’) or ‘Old Louvre’ (Sully Wing) and the Cour Napoléon, enclosed by two wings on the north side (Richelieu Wing) and south side (Denon Wing), which constitute the ‘New Louvre’, with the Cour du Carrousel on the left of it. The Cour Napoléon, and the Cour du Carrousel are separated by the Place du Carrousel.

Their rooms host more than 480,000 works of art installed in the following rooms.

Sully Wing:

• Crypt of the Sphinx, where more than 6,000 pieces from millenary Egypt are on display. It is one of the most important collections of Egyptian art in the world.

• Campana Gallery, which hosts a valuable collection of Greek ceramics. It takes its name from the Marquis Campana, a prominent collector of these pieces.

• Gallery of Antiquities, with its walls are decorated in red marble. It hosts works of Greek art, including theVenus de Milo.

• Hall of the Caryatids, built in the 16thby Pierre Lescot and called this way because of the four supporting columns in the shape of women inside (inspired in the Caryatids of the Erecteion of Athens) sculpted by Jean Goujon in 1550 to hold the tribune of the musicians when it was the dance room. It hosts a Greek statuary, among it stands outDiana the HuntressorDiana of Versailles, a Roman copy in marble from the 2ndB.C. in a bigger size in natural (2 metres high) above an original Greek in brass of the 4thB.C., attributed to Leocares.

• Charles X Museum, where the Egyptian Museum was first installed by Charles X in 1827.

• Furniture and decorative objects from the 18thcentury, which exhibits the customary belongings of kings and queens, as well as other decorative objects.

• Rotonde Sully, which hosts the Department of Graphic Arts, with more than 250,000 works on paper: pastels, drawings, engravings and miniatures from the 11thto the 19thcenturies.

Richelieu Wing:

• Cour Khorsabad, which contains the remains of the Assyrian city of the same name.

• Galerie d’Angoulême,which hosts the collection of Near Eastern Antiquities.

• Cour PugetandCour Marly, named respectively after French sculptor of the 17thcentury and the château where one of the emblematicworks on display was located. These are glazed courtyards where sculptures which had been designed for display in public gardens such as the Tuileries and those surrounding the Palace of Versailles are displayed.

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Diana of Versailles or Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt, a copyright from the

2nd century BC from a Greek original from the 4th century BC assigned to Leocares.

• Galerie Médicis, called this way because it containsMarie de Medici cycle, a total of twenty-one paintings about the life of the Queen of France (hung in chronological order) and three portraits of her and her relatives painted by Rubens.

• Napoleon III Apartments, where the luxurious objects that surrounded the Emperor’s life are kept: vases, chandeliers, portraits, etc.

Denon Wing:

• Daru staircase (Napoleon I’s minister), was built by Hector Lefuel. On its landing is theNike of Samothrace.

• Hall of the States, is the largest room in the museum, was built between 1855 and 1857 to a design by the architect Lefuel. It houses the Louvre’s most emblematic work:La GiocondaorMona Lisa, as well as other large paintings such asThe wedding at Canaby Veronese.

• The Great Gallery, was built in the 16thcentury to link the Louvre Palace with the Tuileries Palace. It contains the highlights of Italian school painting.

• Apollo Gallery, commissioned by Louis XIV in his monomania to identify himself with the Sun God. It hosts, among other royal objects, the crown jewels.

• The Red Rooms, dates from the Second Empire. The main works of French painters of the 17th, 18thand 19thcenturies are on display, with the great history paintings being particularly noteworthy.

• MichelangeloGallery, named after the great Italian sculptor of theCinquecento. In addition to theDying Slaveand theRebellious Slave, sculpted by him, it contains other remarkable works of sculpture from the 16thto the 19thcenturies such asPsyche RevivedbyCupid’s Kissby Canova.

• Cour Visconti, dedicated to Islamic art, more than 3,000 pieces from the 7thto the 19thcenturies, from the emirates and caliphates of al-Andalus (Spain), India, North Africa and Egypt.

• Anne of Austria’s summer flats, where the mother of Louis XIV lived. The original decoration of the ceilings has been preserved.

• The Pavillon des Sessions, designed by Hector Lefuel. It was inaugurated in 2000 to display a selection of 120 works of non-Western art: America, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

Chapter /1

Brief history

of the Louvre

Museum

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The Old Louvre

The first building to stand on the site now occupied by the Louvre Museum was the castle of the same name, which was built in 1190 by King Philip Augustus (1165-1223) before his departure for the Third Crusade, with the aim to reinforce the walled line which protected the right bank of the River Seine, around Paris.

The fortress was almost square in its plant (78 m x 72 m), with ten defensive towers along its perimeter and protected by a moat about 10 m wide, which was flooded by the waters of the river. The main gate to the south and a secondary gate on the opposite side were framed by twin towers with drawbridges. In the centre of the parade courtyard was the donjon or defensive bastion, a circular plant tower with a diameter of approximately 15 metres, a thickness of more than 4 metres and a height of 30 metres, covered with a conical slate structure overhanging the machicolations, and protected by a paved moat of 9 metres wide and 6 metres deep, which could be crossed by a drawbridge.

The term Louvre came into use in 1204 and there are three different theories as to its origin; one of them, the simplest, derives the word from the Latin lupara, meaning wolf, alluding to the presence of herds of these animals on the site. However, according to the French historian Henri Sauval, the term Louvre is a deformation of the expressions leovar or leower, which in the French language mean ‘fortified place’ or ‘watchtower’, referring to the defensive fortifications that were being built to protect against invasions by the Vikings or Normans. A third hypothesis derives the expression Louvre from roboretum (‘oak wood’), a term from which the words rouvre or rouvray etymologically derive.

The castle was enlarged during the reigns of Louis IX the Saint (1226-1270) and Charles V the Wise (1364-1380), who ordered to widen the defensive walls around Paris as a result of the city’s rapid growth, as a consequence the castle lost its original military function. This monarch, through his architect Raymond du Temple, owed the construction in 1358 of the Librairie Tower, the first royal library, which contained more than 900 manuscripts and was the origin of the National Library of France. We know what the fortress looked like in the 15th century thanks to the miniatures in the book of hours entitled The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry, which was begun by the Limbourg brothers around 1410, although they were unable to complete it because they died during the bubonic plague epidemic that struck Europe in successive waves from 1348 onwards.

After the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453), during which the English occupied and stayed in the castle from 1420 to 1436, in the following century, king Francis I (1494-1547), the great driver behind the building and restoration of the castles in the Loire Valley, in particular Chambord, in a surprise coup against the Levantistic nobility and the urban institutions, who had taken advantage of the monarch’s captivity in Madrid after the defeat of Pavia in 1525 against the troops of Charles I of Spain and V of Germany to declare their autonomy, decided to transform the old castle into a modern palace in the Italian Renaissance style, consisting of four wings with an interior courtyard, according to the design of the architect Pierre Lescot in conjunction with the work of the sculptor Jean Goujon, after the donjon had been demolished in 1527. The monarch was one of the main protectors of artistic creations and collecting, bringing to his palace at Fontainebleau, where he established his own school for various Italian masters, including Leonardo da Vinci in the last years of his life.

The works continued with his son Henry II (1547-1559) and, after his death, during the regency of the queen consort Catherine de’ Medici. The walls on the west and south sides were demolished to build the ballroom and the royal pavilion respectively. During the reign of Charles IX (1560-1574) the Petite Galerie was begun in 1566, according to an initial design by Pierre Lescot, but works were stopped around 1570 because of the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots) that shook the country between 1562 and 1598.

With Henry III (1574-1589) and Henry IV (1589-1610) on the throne, the palace became the real centre of monarchical power. A second floor (piano nobile) was added to the Petite Galerie, the Hall of Paintings or Gallery of Kings (dedicated to the former kings and queens of France), but a dreadful fire largely destroyed the upper floor on 6 February 1661. In the previous decade, Queen Anne of Austria, wife of Louis XIII, had commissioned the architect Le Vau, the painter Giovanni Francesco Romanelli and the sculptor Michel Anguier to transform and decorate the ground floor into her summer flat, which was not affected by the fire. In 1800 Napoleon Bonaparte transformed this space into the Gallery of Antiquities, without modifying the lavish decoration that adorned the ceilings, composed of mythological themes, allegories of the seasons, the stars and the virtues, as well as biblical characters, all aimed at extolling the figure of Louis XIV’s queen mother, Marie de’ Medici.

In 1567, Catherine de’ Medici had commissioned the architect Philibert Delorme, who was succeeded on the site by Jean Bullant, to build the Tuileries Palace, a residence of pleasure (whim), named after the old tile factories (tuiles, in French) that existed on the site. To link the new building to the palace, some 500 metres away, Henry IV commissioned the architects Louis Métezeau and Jacques Androuët du Cerceau to build the Galerie du Bord de l’Eau (now the Grand Galerie), oriented as its name suggests towards the banks of the river Seine, to hosts the royal collection of paintings and a workshop for artists, thus beginning the artistic vocation of the Louvre.

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The Louvre, the Tuileries Palace and the Grand Gallery in 1615, according to the Merian map, drawn in 1615 by the Swiss engraver Matthäus Merian the Elder.

Likewise, works also began on the Cour Carrée (Square Courtyard) in the Lescot Wing, which was built in 1546-1551 on the site of the donjon. During the reign of Louis XIII (1610-1643) it was extended by the demolition of the old ramparts on the north side, where the Lemercier Wing was built in 1639, an extension of the former wing named after the architect with the same name. This is the site of the Clock Pavilion, now the Sully Pavilion. Works on the Cour Carrée continued under the direction of the architect Louis Le Vau.

During the reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715), a competition was held to build a large façade on the eastern side to dignify the old building. Several architects competed, including Le Vau, Lemercier and Mansart, but their projects were successively rejected. Then, the superintendent of the King’s Buildings, Jean-Baptiste Colbert called in the well-known Italian architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini, but his designs - up to three in succession, submitted between June 1664 and June 1665 - were not accepted because they seemed to the king to be unrepresentative of monarchical absolutism.

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Perrault’s Colonnade on the eastern façade of the Louvre Palace. A large triangular pediment crowning a triumphal arch presides over the entrance.

The chosen architect was Claude Perrault (1613-1688), who cultivated a grandiloquent style typical of France at the time. Between 1667 and 1670 he built a façade presided over by a large paired colonnade with Corinthian capitals, crowning the entrance with a large triangular pediment over a triumphal arch, all very academic, in the style of the prevailing French classicism, which was not fully completed until Napoleon’s time due to the transfer of the court to Versailles by the Sun King’s unappealable decision.

The interiors were decorated in a classicist style full of baroque, with the most frequent themes from Greco-Roman mythology as ornamental motifs.

Louis XIV commissioned the architect Le Vau and the painter Le Brun to rebuild and decorate the Hall of Paintings or Gallery of Kings, the second floor of the Petite Galerie, to transform it into the Gallery of Apollo, the god of the Sun, with whose emblem he identified his power.

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A lavish decoration, combining painting, sculpture and gilding, enveloped the Gallery of Apollo.

In a display of architectural decoration, combining painting, sculpture and gilding, which would serve as a model for the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles, the vault represents the daily journey of Apollo’s chariot across the sky, from dawn to dusk. Not only the different times of the day, but also the months and seasons of the year, as well as the different signs of the zodiac and the continents, appear under the power of the Sun, similar to the power of the monarch himself, thus exalting the glory of the Sun King.

The transfer of the court to Versailles halted the completion of the lavish work, which was taken up in 1850 under the direction of the architect Félix Duban and with the collaboration of the painter Eugène Delacroix, who decorated the ceiling with the theme Apollo killing the Python snake. On the walls, twenty-eight tapestries depict the effigies of kings and artists who have been involved in the construction and ornamentation of the building over the years.

Today, the Gallery of Apollo houses the royal collection of gems and diamonds of the Crown, pieces made with settings, of which Louis XIV was very fond, bringing together a luxurious collection of more than eight hundred works.

Among the most valuable is the Côte-de-Bretagne spinel, dating from 1750, carved in the shape of a dragon to be part of one of the two jewels destined to adorn the Order of the Golden Fleece. It now weighs 107.88 carats (21.6 grams).

The treasure also holds the three diamonds that adorned the monarchs’ finery and crowns: the Regent (carved in 1704-6 in England from a 426-carat precious stone discovered in India in 1698), the Sancy (made in the shape of a pear around 1600-1700, weighing 53 carats) and the Hortensia, a five-sided pink diamond weighing 20 carats, named after the Queen of Holland, Hortense de Beauharnais, who wore it; carved in 1678, it was acquired by Louis XIV to wear in his buttonhole.

They are also preserved the emerald and diamond jewels made for the Empress Marie-Louise of Austria, Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife, the crown of Louis XV, the upper crown of the Empress Eugénie de Montijo, Napoleon III’s wife, the jewels of Queen Marie Amélie, wife of Louis Philippe d’Orléans, and other luxury items such as the insignia of the Order of the Elephant of Denmark, goblets, vases and navettes of agate, jade and lapis lazuli, vases of rock crystal and other sumptuary objects of extraordinary value.

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The Cour Carrée of the ‹Old Louvre› to the west. From left to right: Lescot Wing, Sully Pavilion (former Clock Pavilion) and Lemercier Wing.

This construction completed the part of the palace known as the Old Louvre, the Cour Carrée, a quadrangle of about 160 metres on each side, made up of eight wings articulated in as many pavilions: Beauvais Pavilion, Marengo Pavilion, North-East Pavilion, Central Pavilion, South-East Pavilion, Pavilion of the Arts, King’s Pavilion and Sully Pavilion, (formerly Pavillon de l’Horloge: ‘Clock Pavilion’), to the sides of which extend the Lescot and Lemercier Wings. The centre is occupied by a fountain. The reliefs and statues which are adorning the exteriors are mostly allegorical in nature or refer to certain religious (Moses with the Tablets of the Law), mythological (the Egyptian goddess Isis with sistrum) and historical figures (the Inca emperor Manco Capac with the Sun and Numa Pompilius, the second monarch of Rome). The monograms of the kings appear on the parts built under their reign: Henry II, Charles IX, Henry IV, Louis XIII and Louis XIV. The Republic placed a cockerel, the national symbol, on the pediment of the central pavilion of the East Wing.

Collecting had experienced a golden age during the regencies of Cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu, the latter amassed a large number of works from the collections of Vicenzo Gonzaga and the Duke of Mantua, while the former from the collection of Charles I of England. These collections were supplemented by gifts and donations from people seeking royal favor, which necessitated the creation of the post of Garde des tableaux et dessins du roi, it is said, curator of the palace, an appointment which fell to the official painter Charles Le Brun.

The construction and transfer of the court of the Sun King to the Palace of Versailles meant that the Louvre Palace was abandoned as a royal residence and converted into an art gallery and exhibition space.

The royal collections were expanded by the acquisitions of Louis XV and Louis XVI. The first of these monarchs, who had been fond of tapestry cartoons (commissioned, among others, from Fragonard, Boucher and Van Loo for his royal apartments), had the idea of opening the Luxembourg Palace to the public two days a week from 1750 for the exhibition of more than a hundred works, in what can be considered the first gestation of the museum.

Louis XVI fitted out the Grande Galerie for the exhibition of paintings and emphasised the spirit of collecting and the policy of restoration which, at that time, was pervading the enlightened monarchs of much of Europe. In 1784, the painter Hubert Robert was appointed director with the task of restoring the collections, but the Revolution put an end to that work five years later.

In May 1791 the National Assembly decreed that the Louvre and the Tuileries Palace, in addition to being the royal residence, should be used for the collection of works of art, and paintings from the royal sites and religious deposits began to be brought in.

On 8 November 1793, after the nationalisation of royal and ecclesiastical property with the suppression of the religious orders, the gathering of the art treasures of Saint Denis and the collections of the nobility who had been forced into exile, and the official creation of the Muséum Central des Arts de la République (Central Museum of the Arts of the Republic) by decree of 27 July 1793, was opened to the public although without chronological and stylistic classification, the Great Gallery of the Louvre, which had been inaugurated on 10 August of the same year in the palace that had housed the headquarters of the French Academy and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture throughout the century.

After the building was closed between 1796 and 1801 due to structural deficiencies, in 1803, when Napoleon was consul for life, the museum, at the behest of its first director, Dominique-Vivant Denon, took the name of the future emperor (Napoleon Museum), who became the great despoiler of works during his military campaigns, several of which, after the defeat (1814) and restoration (1815), were not and have not been returned to this day for various reasons.

Charles X (1757-1836) ordered a new gallery to be built along the Rue Rivoli, parallel to the Galerie du Bord de l’Eau which had been built on the initiative of Henry IV. The Departments of Greek and Egyptian Antiquities were created in this space under the name Musée Charles X (Charles X Museum), inaugurated on 5 December 1827. Jean-François Champollion, who had become famous in 1822 for deciphering the Rosetta Stone, a fragment of an ancient Egyptian stele in black diorite found by a French military detachment on 15 July 1799 on the site from which it takes its name, was appointed head of the museum. On its surface there is a decree published in the city of Memphis in 196 BC, written in three languages: hieroglyphic, demotic and ancient Greek. Champollion’s decipherment in the first of these languages of the phonetic characters Kleopatra and Ptolemy, the pharaoh to whom divine worship was ordered on the occasion of his coronation, made it possible to read the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt, which led to the birth of the science of Egyptology.

The New Louvre

The westward extensions carried out during the 19th century by Napoleon I (1804-1815) and Louis Napoleon III (1852-1870), extended the palace by 500 metres on the north and south sides of the Cour Napoléon and the Cour du Carrousel, are known as the New Louvre.

The north side is formed, from east to west, by three large pavilions along the Rue Rivoli on the right bank of the Seine: Pavillon de la Bibliothèque, Pavillon de Rohan and Pavillon de Marsan. Inside the first there are three other pavilions: Pavillon Colbert, Pavillon Richelieu and Pavillon Turgot, opening onto three secondary courtyards, from east to west: Cour Khorsabad, Cour Puget and Cour Marly.

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The ‘New Louvre’. From left to right: Pavillon Turgot, Pavillon Richelieu and Pavillon Colbert, on the north side of the palace.

The south side of the New Louvre consists, from east to west, of five large pavilions along the Quai François Mitterrand (formerly Quai du Louvre): Pavillon de Lesdiguières, Pavillon des Sessions, Pavillon de La Tremoille, Pavillon of the States and Pavillon de Flore. As on the northern side, three inner pavilions (Pavillon Daru, Pavillon Denon and Pavillon Mollien) open onto three courtyards: Cour du Sphinx, Cour Visconti and Cour Lefuel.

During Bonaparte’s reign, the architects Charles Percier and Pierre-François Fontaine, who restructured and decorated the Grande Galerie du Louvre and completed the façade on the Rue Rivoli, were also commissioned to build the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (1806-1808) to commemorate the Emperor’s battlefield victories, inside a new courtyard created by the union of the Tuileries and the Louvre parallel to the Grand Gallery. The chariot that crowned it came from the looting of the four bronze horses (copies of Greek originals from the 4th century BC), which were in St Mark’s Square in Venice, where they had been plundered by the Venetians from the Byzantines when Constantinople was conquered by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The charioteer who led them originally represented the emperor, but after the military disasters he ordered the statue to be removed. Today, after the horses were returned to Venice following the defeat at Waterloo (1815), there is a replica of the chariot,